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The King of Comedy
Screening: Monday 22 May, 6:30pm
USA
1982
Director: Martin Scorsese
Production co: Embassy International
Producer: Arnon Milchan
Screenplay: Paul D. Zimmerman
Cinematography: Fred Schuler
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Production designer: Boris Leven
Costume designer: Richard Bruno
Sound: Frank Warner, Les Lazarowitz
Rupert Pupkin: Robert DeNiro
Jerry Langford: Jerry Lewis
Rita: Diahnne Abbott
Masha: Sandra Bernhard
Himself: Ed Herlihy
Band leader: Lou Brown
109 mins
16mm
PG cert
ADMISSION STRICTLY MEMBERS ONLY
Scorsese and De Niro have been pushing each other so far for so long that audience polarisation now automatically accompanies the risk of their major-league collaboration. The King of Comedy guarantees a split even at the level of expectations: it's definitively not a comedy, despite being hilarious; it pays acute homage to Jerry Lewis, while requiring of the man no hint of slapstick infantilism; its uniquely repellent prize nerd is De Niro himself. The excruciating tone is set by an early freeze-frame of fingernails frantically scraping glass. Flinch here, and you're out, because Scorsese never does while detailing fantasist Rupert Pupkin's squirmily obsessive desperation to crash TV's real-time as a stand-up comic on the Carson-modelled Jerry Langford Show. Buttonholing its star (Lewis), then rebounding from brush-offs to hatch a ludicrous kidnap plot, De Niro's Pupkin isn't merely socially inadequate; he's a whole dimension short - happily rehearsing with cardboard cut-outs, choosing the flatness of videoscreen space for his schmucky jester's tilt at being 'king for a night'. Whereas the film itself is all unexpected dimensions and unsettling excesses, with the ambiguous fulfilment of Pupkin's dream frighteningly echoing the news-headline coda of Taxi Driver. Creepiest movie of the year in every sense, and one of the best. - Paul Taylor, Time Out Film Guide
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